Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 20:08:59 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: marcel@cup.hp.com (Marcel Moolenaar) Cc: mbendiks@eunet.no (Marius Bendiksen), phk@critter.freebsd.dk (Poul-Henning Kamp), des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav), ume@mahoroba.org (Hajimu UMEMOTO), arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: %a and %A formats Message-ID: <200012132008.NAA10673@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <3A37CB39.C2E8AA67@cup.hp.com> from "Marcel Moolenaar" at Dec 13, 2000 02:17:13 PM
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> Using indexes to refer to the arguments (vectors) has an advantage for > i18n. The order of the arguments is related to the language and some > translations produce better messages if the order of the arguments isn't > fixed. Having been forced down this route before, I can tell you that it is an _incredibly_ shortsighted thing to do to localize kernel messages or log messages. A company I worked for _stupidy_ localized log messages. The result of doing this was that users could read the logs in their native language, but engineers supporting problems could not do root cause analysis, since they were trained as (this is a "big surprise") engineers, and not as linguists. Obviously, this was the idea of the UI folks, who wanted to give users eye-candy so that they would be happy with their purchase, and their idea of making this happen was to let them look at the log messages as the code chugged along doing its job, with no thought to support issues. A lot of people whine about sendmail status code not being in their native language. Some SMTP servers actually translate these status codes into other languages (I've seen German and French). Ignoring, for the moment, the _fact_ that RFC821 prohibits non-ASCI characters over an SMTP command transport, there is no locale information about the person on the other end of the SMTP hose. You can't assume their language/locale like this. The technically correct thing to do is to translate error codes in the MUA by providing the correct message for a given error number, in the locale specified by the user for the MUA. In other words, making up for deficient mail clients by changing the error responses is a stupid idea (the same argument applies to decoding DSNs in a locale specific way). For log messages, the appropriate method is to create a format for logging that gives parametric, machine-parsable logs, and then to localize the logs on viewing. A secondary win to this approach is that an appropriately modified syslogd can track state transitions in the programs it is logging for, and then report overall status information (ideally, via SNMP Application or Network Services monitoring MIBs). Kernel messages are, likewise, an issue of status or exceptional condition reporting. It _may_ not be justified to go the whole AIX route and assign facility and error numbers for kernel messages... I'd argue that most of them aren't in English, anyway, and are untranslatable. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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